The place of Islam and its representation has become a central issue in recent years in an increasingly multicultural German society

View of the Mevlana Mosque, one of the oldest in Germany, in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. (Photo by Zacharie Scheurer/Hans Lucas)

Rarely has a project stirred up such controversy in the city of Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thurngia.

On Nov. 13, the small community of Ahmadis, a Muslim reformist movement often denounced by Islam’s majority Sunnis, laid the first stone of its future mosque at a ceremony attended by the Thuringa's Prime Minister, Bodo Ramelow.

The ceremony was extremely importance for Erfurt’s 60-strong Ahmadi community and particularly symbolical for the region, which has some 7,000 Muslims but no mosque worthy of the name.

As Bodo Ramelow knelt to place the first stone, about 60 demonstrators close to the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party shouted “Shame on You” into a megaphone.

The place of Islam and its representation has become a central issue in recent years in an increasingly multicultural German society.

Since the arrival in 2015 of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, the AfD has made Islam and its influence one of its favourite themes.

Does Islam belong in Germany? Chancellor Angela Merkel says it does. Her Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, says it does not.

A Bavarian and leader of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), he says: “Germany was fashioned by Christianity, which includes the Sunday holiday, the religious holidays and rituals such as Easter, Pentecost and Christmas.”

Seehofer is very sceptical about the ability of Germany's 5 million Muslims to integrate. He wants to place the issue on the agenda of the fourth German Conference on Islam, DIK, which opens in late November in Berlin.

The forum was initiated in 2006 by Christian Democrat Wolfgang Schäuble, current president of the Bundestag, to encourage dialogue.

“This conference has the enormous advantage of having the highest representatives of the State sit with the highest representatives of the very many Muslim organisations, which finally feel recognized,” explains Riem Spielhaus, an expert on Islam at the University of Göttingen.

“It was very useful in the early days, since it made it possible to reach consensus on introducing a course on Islam in schools and creating Muslim theology departments.”

The discussions promise to be tough at this fourth conference, with the Interior Minister wishing to move ahead on the issue of German Islam.

The place of the German language in mosques, the financing of places of worship, the risk of ghetto-forming and the creation of parallel societies are all complex, potentially controversial themes.

Horst Seehofer also wishes to curb the influence of conservative Islamic organisations like the Milli Göris Turkish movement by involving more personalities independent of the big Muslim organisations in the Conference.

Further, he has announced his desire to rotate the bodies represented at the meeting in the name of diversity.

While the establishment of this forum has facilitated dialogue, day-to-day work remains complex given the extreme diversity of Muslims in Germany and the federal structure of German institutions.

“Our interlocutors are the States, which all have different conceptions,” said Burhan Kesici, president of the Islamic Council of Germany, Islamrat, which represents 448 Turkish Sunni mosques.

In actual practice, this gives rise to models of cooperation that vary greatly from one region to the next.

For Burhan Kesici, “Hamburg and Bremen are models in this field.”

After years of negotiations, the two city-states signed a contract with the various local Muslim organisations, which made it possible to resolve most of the key issues of daily life, such as creating Muslim holidays, managing religious classes, building mosques and managing cemeteries.

The other German states resolve these issues on a case-by-case basis or leave them to the religious communities.

What about a status for Muslims along the lines of that of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, which are financed under a so-called religious tax?

The question is a real hot potato. Its resolution has been made more difficult by the extreme diversity of opinion on the issue among Muslims themselves.

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